Obama's Lukewarm Start With Europe

President Obama's honeymoon with Europe lasted precisely one month. On February 20 of last year, Defense Secretary Robert Gates sat down in the Sheraton Hotel in Krakow, Poland, for a meeting with NATO defense ministers and was told not to ask for any more troops for Afghanistan, because they wouldn't be forthcoming. This was a surprise, and not a pleasant one, for the Americans. Only two weeks earlier, Vice President Biden had addressed a security conference in Munich and had laid out just how dramatically the Obama administration intended to change Washington's conduct of foreign affairs. The United States was going to listen more to its allies, Biden said--and it was going to ask more of them. Europeans heard the first part and loved it, but had the second part gotten lost in translation?

It looked that way. Here was Gates, coming to consult in the new fashion and getting a thumbs-down on more help. Polls showed that Obama was enormously popular in Europe after George W. Bush's presidency -- he still is, in fact -- but he was discovering in short order how little cooperation his popularity had won for him.

Krakow didn't represent anything like a rupture in NATO. It was at worst a disappointment. In the six weeks that followed, the two sides patched things up a bit; and when Obama went in April to a NATO summit in Strasbourg, France, the European allies came up with more help -- civilian and military -- for Afghanistan. Nevertheless, you could already call the new president a sadder but wiser man. "What we anticipate," he said at the close of the conference, "is not only that we will see additional resources brought to bear on the strategy but that also we will have established a baseline of honesty and clarity about our purpose so that it will be much more difficult for each of us in NATO to try to avoid or shirk the serious responsibilities that are involved in accomplishing our mission. OK?"

The mood didn't lift much when Obama left Strasbourg for the Czech Republic and a joint summit of the United States and the 27-member European Union.

"The Prague summit at which President Obama was subjected to 27 interventions from the E.U.'s assembled heads of state and government was an eye-opener for his administration," wrote Jeremy Shapiro and Nick Witney in a report for the European Council on Foreign Relations. "Senior [administration] figures have made plain to us their dread" of further such talkathons.

Obama showed last month that he could sit for more than six hours while 38 members of Congress talked about health care reform, but that, at least, was a conversation about a substantive issue. The E.U. likes to have confabs even when it's not clear that it has anything on the agenda worth discussing; such talking doesn't mesh with Obama's style, and it's why he declined to attend a summit planned for Spain later this spring.

(A senior administration official disputed Shapiro and Witney's account. In an interview with National Journal, this official, who was with Obama in Prague and asked to remain anonymous, described it as "a very dynamic discussion; I think it was quite energizing for him." Since then, Shapiro has gone to work at the State Department as a senior adviser for Europe.)

The little annoyances have kept coming. A spat here, a snub there, a reconciliation, a smoothing over, a handshake, a raised eyebrow, a thoughtless remark. "There is coolness. It has come as a surprise. And it does matter," says Kori Schake, a Hoover Institution fellow and a professor at West Point.

Back-Burnered

But how did this happen? Obama came to the presidency as a well-traveled, cosmopolitan, widely read multilateralist. Republicans mocked him for being more at home in Europe than in the United States. For their part, Europeans expected Obama to usher in a new era of partnership and cooperation, not only on security but also on such issues as climate change. "Barack Obama is the personification of all the things Europeans like about the United States," says Karen Donfried, executive vice president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. But the relationship keeps hitting rough patches, and over the next year both sides will likely have fewer opportunities to inject some warmth into their dealings.

The Czech Republic, France, Germany, and Great Britain all have regional or national elections coming up, as does, of course, the United States. With the lingering bad economy, domestic politics will consume all five nations. The White House has already announced that in his second year in office, Obama won't be seeing as much of Europe.

To be sure, a gigantic volume of trans-Atlantic trade continues to flow, and Europe and the United States coordinate and cooperate on a huge array of issues. Europe's tough and unified response to Iran's nuclear program, for example, has especially gratified Washington. And Obama did make six trips to Europe in his first year, even if one of them consisted of a few hours' futile effort to win the 2016 Summer Olympics for Chicago.

"This is where we're anchored in the world," the senior administration official said. "It goes without saying that Europe is our closest partner. I expect to do a lot of business in the coming year."

Some experts argue that Europe doesn't get much attention from the administration because there aren't any crises that demand it. (Greece's debt problem could change that, but the U.S. will step in only if the euro-zone nations are unable to work out a rescue. That's not unthinkable.) But others worry that without a little care and feeding, relations between Europe and the United States could go seriously awry. "Both sides are feeling, frankly, frustrated," says Heather Conley, director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "Both sides are trying to smile their way through it, and it's a strange smile."

The economy is a source of tension, as Germany and France have resisted stimulus spending and criticized the U.S. and U.K. on that score. Germany and the U.S. are arguing over nuclear weapons on German soil. British conservatives are mightily annoyed that Washington hasn't weighed in on behalf of Britain in a new dispute over the Falkland Islands. The U.S. would like to see Europe help out more on the issue of Guantanamo--by taking more of the detainees.

One problem is that Obama's predecessor fooled a lot of people while he was president. "It was very easy in the Bush years to define the problem in the trans-Atlantic relationship as George Bush," Donfried says. European discomfort with and disdain for Bush masked a deeper reality -- which is that the U.S. pursues its national interests while Europe, as a single entity, still struggles to get its act together. Throughout the Cold War, when NATO and the E.U. were established, Europe was the setting for the confrontation between East and West, but it wasn't one of the two chief protagonists. In grammatical terms, Europe was the object of the sentence, and it still hasn't figured out how to act now as the subject. That spells frustration in Washington.

The truth is, a French diplomat says, it was exciting to be the country that stood up to Bush. It took a lot of nerve, but it wasn't complicated. Today, trying to work with Obama (and the Germans and the British and the Dutch and the Danes and the Eurocrats) -- that's complicated.

Isn't It Romantic?

Too much can be made of personal chemistry, but it does count for something -- and Obama hasn't exactly clicked with any of Europe's leaders. In Paris, he turned down an invitation to dine at the Elysee Palace with President Nicolas Sarkozy and instead took Michelle Obama to a restaurant for dinner. "Good friends don't worry about the symbol and the conventions and the protocols," he said the next day, grinning broadly, while Sarkozy sat alongside looking as if he had just lost his last euro at the roulette table. In Japan, Obama said he wanted to be the first "Pacific president," and although presidents have been saying similar things going back to Theodore Roosevelt's time, Europeans wondered darkly where that left the Atlantic.

Obama's father was Kenyan -- a British colonial subject. In Dreams From My Father, his early autobiography, Obama writes that Europe set off no sparks for him on his first trip there. "By the end of the first week or so, I realized that I'd made a mistake. It wasn't that Europe wasn't beautiful; everything was just as I'd imagined it. It just wasn't mine. I felt as if I were living out someone else's romance."

Then, on his way to Africa, he draws a particularly unflattering portrait of a young British man seated next to him on the plane, who reveals himself, through his conversation, to be disdainful and condescending toward Africans. Obama describes him as troubled by acne and as having a "fin-shaped nose."

"Obama is the first president since World War II who is not an Atlanticist," says Reginald Dale, director of the Transatlantic Media Network at CSIS. "He doesn't think in terms of the West. He doesn't quite get the point of Europe. He's constantly treating the European leaders with disdain, in a sort of haughty manner."

Obama seemingly doesn't realize that doing something like skipping dinner with Sarkozy has consequences. "That's a humiliation," Dale says. "Sarkozy is very susceptible to slights and snubs. And, of course, the press overplays it tremendously. But these things matter. There is a lot of anti-Americanism in Europe still, and you don't want to fan the flames of it. If you slap the president of France in the face, you're slapping France in the face."

Sarkozy is scheduled to have dinner with Obama in the White House at the end of the month. But Bush, unlike Obama, had his favorites down to the ranch at Crawford, Texas, or up to his father's place in Kennebunkport, Maine. He once spontaneously massaged German Chancellor Angela Merkel's shoulders -- and Europe's leaders loved that sort of attention.

Does that make Obama haughty? "Haughty compared to 'You're either with us, or against us'? Haughty compared to, 'Old Europe'?" exclaims Schake, who worked under Bush at the State Department and on the National Security Council. Obama went to Europe six times, she says, "and has nothing to show for it." She makes it clear that this isn't Obama's fault. "President Obama's expectations for the kind of partners Europeans were going to be were far grander than Europe was prepared to deliver." An attitude within the current administration, Schake says, is that "Europe is not relevant and not making itself relevant."

That, of course, is not what you hear from the chief soothers: the vice president and the secretary of State.

"We are closer than ever to achieving the goal that has inspired European and American leaders and citizens -- not only a Europe transformed, secure, democratic, unified, and prosperous but a Euro-Atlantic alliance that is greater than the sum of its parts," Hillary Rodham Clinton said in a speech in January in Paris.

Here's Biden, in Romania last October: "I know that some in Central Europe look at the problems and responsibilities the United States has assumed around the world and conclude that we have no longer focused on this region of the world. In fact, it's precisely because of our global responsibilities and your growing capacity and willingness to meet them with us that we value our partnership with Central Europe and Europe now more than we ever had."

Donfried of the German Marshall Fund points out that interests, not personal chemistry, drive foreign policy, and that both the United States and Europe recognize that it is in their interest to work together. "This is a U.S. that has declined in power, so the need to work with partners around the world is even greater," she says. "I would not be an alarmist."

A Soupçon Of Self-Loathing

But there are plenty of critics within Europe who despair at the fecklessness of the European Union. In a recent report titled "Is Europe Doomed to Fail as a Power?" Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, lamented the uncoordinated and self-defeating approach that Europe often takes to problems. "Many E.U. governments give the impression they would be happy if the Union were a big Switzerland -- prosperous and safe but reluctant to worry about problems in other parts of the world and very unwilling to take responsibility for solving them."

Shapiro and Witney wrote: "Thus far, the Obama administration has seen European governments broadly living down to their expectations. It has found them weak and divided -- ready to talk a good game but reluctant to get muddy. Seen from Washington, there is something almost infantile about how European governments behave toward them -- a combination of attention-seeking and responsibility-shirking."

Richard Gowan of the European Council on Foreign Relations says, "All the navel-gazing in Brussels makes it harder to work with Europe than one would like."

When European politicians go to Washington, Chris Patten, a British Conservative and the chancellor of Oxford University, wrote in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, they look above all for "the assurance they still matter, that they are still loved, that the U.S. gives a fig about what they have to say about the world's many problems."

"Seen from Washington, there is something almost infantile about how European governments behave."

They don't always get that assurance.

The Obama administration has moved the focus of economic consultation from the G-8 to the G-20, to include Brazil, China, India, and some of the other more important commercial nations. "For the economic and financial crisis of this nature, having the major emerging markets and developing countries at the table is critical," Michael Froman, deputy national security adviser, said before a G-20 meeting in London a year ago. Three-quarters of the members of the G-8 were from Europe; just five members of the G-20 are European (and that counts Russia). But that's still an overrepresentation. When Obama goes to the G-20 talks, as Gowan points out, "he finds he's still talking to a lot of Europeans." Europe is overrepresented on the board of the International Monetary Fund as well.

The Americans are well aware of this, and are irritated, Schake says. "When Obama has a financial crisis to solve, he has to worry about the Chinese. He doesn't have to worry about the Belgians."

After the NATO summit in Strasbourg a year ago, an Austrian reporter asked Obama for his impressions of the European way of doing things. It was interesting, the president replied, "to see that political interaction in Europe is not that different from the United States Senate." That, of course, was before Obama's health care and energy initiatives, along with several dozen nominations, had bogged down in the Senate. Still, his remark doesn't quite come across as a compliment.

On The Eastern Front

Perhaps as a consequence of that perception, the administration has taken to barreling ahead where it can. In July, Obama went to Moscow and engaged in friendly talks with Russian leaders. This prompted an alarmed open letter from Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, and other former Central European leaders. They urged Obama not to abandon Central Europe or to dismiss its security concerns. They worried about a growing parochialism in their own countries and in the United States, and warned that "NATO today seems weaker than when we joined." Biden, at this point, had already scheduled a trip to Georgia and Ukraine to reassure leaders of those countries about American intentions toward Russia. With half the Continent now wide-eyed over fears that Obama would recognize a Russian sphere of influence, the vice president ended his trip with a Wall Street Journal interview in which he heaped scorn on Moscow.

That was a zig that smoothed some ruffled feathers, but in September the administration zagged with the sudden announcement that it was dropping Bush's plan to put a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Worse, the news came out on September 17, which just happened to be the 70th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in the early days of World War II -- not a good moment to look like you're conceding something to the Russians. The CSIS's Conley says that the administration was fully aware of the date but went ahead with the announcement because it suited the U.S. timetable. Later, the administration's envoys explained to the Central Europeans how Obama was changing the system but not canceling it, and that assuaged a lot of the fears. Still, just to make sure, there was Biden in Romania, a month afterward, smoothing things out again.

In December, Obama flew to Copenhagen at the close of the climate-change summit that Europeans had been preparing for for years. Europe was intending to lead the way by example and forge a new agreement. (Europeans, as they often do, had underestimated the power of Congress in determining American policy.) Obama sat down with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and began negotiating without the Europeans in the room. It was a humiliation. China didn't budge, and the conference ended without a binding pact. "He completely shafted the Europeans," Dale says of Obama.

The E.U. is not a nation, and it can't act like one. Obama, the former community organizer, plausibly might have been OK with that -- but he's the chief executive now. The Spanish summit would come at a time when it isn't clear, after ratification of the Lisbon Treaty to create a new power structure in the E.U., who could speak for Europe or even if Spain had the right to call such a conference. At the moment, Washington can't find people in Europe who have the clout to make deals. There is a new president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, but he's not a head of state, by any means, and he's presiding over a Union in considerable flux. There is unfinished business in Europe, Assistant Secretary of State Philip H. Gordon says, but some of that business will have to wait until the Europeans figure out how much they want the E.U. to take the lead for them.

What Are We Fighting For?

Europe, all of the experts agree, wants U.S. leadership, even as Europeans bristle at American condescension and complain about American simplemindedness. But perhaps nowhere has this tendency led to more complications than in the policy toward Afghanistan. Europe's commitment to the Afghan war is sizable -- 40,000 troops -- even though Europe doesn't have the per capita military resources of the United States. European governments support the mission, but it is extraordinarily unpopular among their publics. The selling point has been the need to stand by the United States; Europe's leaders have not made the argument that success in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) against Islamic extremism is in Europe's own interests. As a result, they haven't convinced ordinary Europeans. "They don't see the benefits," Conley says. "They just see the body bags."

After leaning on NATO members to support his new strategy on Afghanistan a year ago, Obama launched his rethink in the fall. Europe's reaction, Conley says, was, "Wait. You're going to do this again? You're going to ask for more?" In her view, that's when the administration's relations with Europe took a real turn downward, and she fears that they won't improve any time soon. The Dutch government fell last month over its involvement in Afghanistan. That prompted Secretary Gates to start worrying out loud about European pacifism.

Afghanistan has helped to bring into focus fundamental questions about NATO's future role. Should it be a platform for expeditionary forces, as in Afghanistan? A territorial defense organization? A deterrent to Russian adventurism? Will the arms that France wants to sell to Russia be used someday against NATO's Central European members? And how much can Europe afford to spend on defense? The U.S. says more than it does, but Britain is paring back and talking about sharing defense responsibilities with other European countries.

Last spring, Biden launched a renewed U.S. interest in the Balkans with a visit to Bosnia, Kosovo, and Serbia. Bosnia was again teetering on the brink of open conflict among its ethnic factions, and it was generally recognized that--while the U.S. under Bush had been busy in Iraq and Afghanistan -- the Europeans had not been very successful in bringing the Balkans along toward a final settlement. A year later, there are grumblings in Europe about America's intrusion in Bosnia and a desire among European leaders to take over the efforts to stabilize the country. This, Conley says, is a perfect example of the push-me, pull-you dynamic that lies at the heart of Europe's relations with America. For years, the United States has sought a stronger Europe, and Europe seems perpetually unwilling to rise to the challenge.

That's not only in the Balkans but also on relations with Russia, which has been very successful in splitting Europe over energy policy; or the situation with Turkey, which is a member of NATO but has up to now been barred from the E.U. "Turkey doesn't allow NATO and the E.U. to play well together," Conley says. That's a problem.

Some U.S. administrations have been patient with Europe. Obama's approach, says Conley, who worked in the State Department during Bush's first term, is more workmanlike and less schmoozy: "I'm a busy kind of guy."

But, as then-Secretary of State Colin Powell used to tell her, a relationship with another country is like a bank account. You have to replenish it once in a while so you can keep making withdrawals when you need to. Conley worries that the administration believes that it did Europe in its first year and doesn't need to revisit those issues. Replenishing the account, she says, is a valuable practice, even if it doesn't always feel like the best use of scarce resources.

This article appeared in the Saturday, March 13, 2010 edition of National Journal.

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